Human interaction is mediated by the effects of perceiving the presence of other human. Their verbal and nonverbal cues are of the essence to our nature and function as social animals. Recent psychological experiments and brain MRI results confirm what motivational experts and organizational adepts have always known: that people function both proactively and reactively, the latter particularly to stimuli from other folks they are in communication with. Successful business models involve an acknowledgement of this fact, from ADHD coaches to podcasting housework mavens like FlyLady, from squawk-box-driven brokerage boiler rooms to talking-head TV programming.
But as the social web around us has expanded with the aid of electronic communications, the technological limitations of its early implementation have stifled the development of the end user. Though some relatively feeble attempts to add a bit of face to the interface, such as with programs like Facebook, have succeeded quickly and been imitated by others, most have focused on growing a network faster rather than representing and relating it to each user in a better way. This has further led to a fractured social graph with multiple modes of not just communication, but representation also, with competing networks, identity management and user interfaces. And again, most attempts at improvement have been focused toward the center, not the nodes.
Take for example, the simple ring tone. A ring tone is an audio segment played to alert the user of a telecommunications device to an incoming phone call or other type of communication. Ring tones are typically stored as digital audio files on a telecommunications device such as a cellular phone. Customizable ring tones have gained in popularity, as they allow users to set a specific ring tone to be played when receiving a call from a specific person recognized by their caller ID. Many carriers offer services whereby users may download specialized ring tones such as songs or other sound effects directly to a device. In the alternative, digital audio files may be uploaded to a telecommunications device and used as a ring tone. Utilities exist which enable users to create their own ring tones based on pre-recorded sounds, allowing mixing of multiple sounds and other forms of audio manipulation.
However, though a diversity of customization options exists for the creation of ring tones, these technologies only facilitate the singular function of identifying the calling party to the user. Existing ring tone technologies do not provide the user with any additional information relating to the caller or the probable context of their call. Therefore, additional utility would be derived if a ring tone not only aided in identification of the caller, but also provided information as to the probable intent of the caller. The present invention solves this problem through the creation of a ring tone which incorporates the content of previous correspondence with the caller.
Hardly any attempt to help a user associate a call request with his counterparty have penetrated the market, and none have utilized the voice from a prior conversation, which is a natural and effective remainder.
What is needed in the art is a means for remedying this lack of a humanized, individualized connectivity environment by gathering the separate threads of electronically-mediated connectivity not in their collective cloud, but rather at the individual. By furnishing the user with technology to integrate multimodal streams of communication from other people, and from himself, with representations that are more naturally suited for his sensory and cognitive nature, we furnish a better system to deal with telecommunication.